With the recent news of the IT servers ending (thanks for all you have done klanana, especially when I randomly added you to get plugins!), thought it would be good to clear up some stuff about the surftimer many of you have seen and heard about.

What is it: An Eventscripts plugin that does map, stage, checkpoint, bonus times, player points and ranking for surf maps (+ way more). Comparable to what KSF is running and as far as I know there is nothing that comes close to it in TF2, apart from skillsrank, but i'll touch on that later.

You can try it out on an AUS surf skill server I run: 103.23.148.107:27115

Features:- All menus systems are in game, this means you navigate top times, player profiles, map profiles almost instantly aside of course from your ping to the server- Speedcap system that stops people from prehopping any starting zones (start for linears, and any stage stops for staged)- Points for stage, map, bonus completition, and more points for top 10 map, or 1st in stage or bonus. Points may be revisted- It takes me about 3 min to setup a linear map with the zones, and about 10 min for a staged map. Except classics...- Admins can delete maps, map/stage/bonus times, players all from in-game menu- Chat ranking system. Everyone has a tag next to their name (like [casual]) and color based on their rank- Hud elements = Current time, stage, WR for stage, your PR for stage and WR for stage, time between these two

Potential features- Very easy to integrate all stats onto a website running on python (according to Absolute can easily reuse same code)- Absolute is working on a plugin that spawns a bot that mimics player actions. This could be set up so a Bot is constantly, or on demand, doing the WR run for a map. The bot can be used so players always feel slow, or spec'd to see the routes!

How did I get it: Maybe 6 months ago contacted a guy called Absolute on the ES forums who is the genius behind it. I had no idea if it would work for tf2 or not. I bought the plugin off him (plugins this good don't come free), and ofc it didn't work. However, a couple small modifications with tf2 vs css vars and we were able to get it going exactly as it runs in css.

I've been spending the last months modifying the plugin to add some features, redo some things and adjust it for how tf2 surfing is (importantly the speedcap)

So its perfect? No. The surftimer version on my server uses sqlite, which is local database storage for 1 server only. Works great. However, Absolute is working on changing everything to run off mysql (multiple servers with only 1 database). However, this is a massive change, that introduces a lot of issues. So it is not ready atm, but is being worked on. I will try get an estimated finish from him, but it's very difficult to do with all the unexpected problems that come with scripting.

Lastly, it's worth noting any server wanting to run this plugin would also need to buy the plugin off Absolute, as I did. I paid 80 euros for the sqlite surftimer, but he will probably want to put the price up for the mysql version. His price also varies with the demand for the timer. More customers means he can lower his price. He's been working at least the last month on it, and probably several more weeks. I will try lock this down with him later . He has put hundreds of hours into this plugin, so I had no issues with paying a couple hours of my work for it. I will not be giving it out to anyone for free, and hope others who buy the plugin have the same respect for him.

Jump timer? In the way future, I am looking at how we can modify this surf timer into a jump timer. The admins don't even have skillsrank running on AusJump, so I can't really speak as to how it compares, but I get the impression we are due for a change. Again, this is very long term, so I'm not even thinking about it atm.

So i guess to summarise:

- Surftimer for 1 server is running fine and you can try it out (103.23.148.107:27115), or ask me any questions here

- Surftimer for multiple servers is in dev, but is taking longer than expected. I was hoping done this week, but will take much longer, will try to get ETA but it's hard to predict.

- In the future, server owners would need to pay Absolute to get this plugin. So this isn't an ideal plugin for ppl looking to just host a cheap server for their friends. I imagine long term we will have a small number of servers around the world, all connected to same DB

- Jump timer is a long term goal, so no promises but that is definitely something i'm aiming for. I'm bad at surf